File previews
Click a path in your terminal and taiku opens it in the right viewer—PDFs, data tables, 3D meshes, notebooks, and more.
When a command prints a file path, you can open it in a viewer matched to that file type instead of treating it as a download.
Open a file from the terminal
Paths in terminal output become clickable. Click one and taiku opens the file in a viewer chosen for its type—a table for a CSV, a 3D viewer for a mesh, a paged reader for a PDF.
You have a few ways to open a file:
- Click a path in any terminal to open it in the overlay viewer.
- Click a file in the sidebar to open it the same way.
- Promote a file into a tile so it stays visible while you work. Text and code files offer an Edit action; PDFs offer View in tile. Rich previews—tables, 3D models, notebooks—keep their interactive viewer in the tile.
- Step through siblings using the chevron strip in the viewer header to move between files of the same type in that folder.
Supported preview types
taiku previews dozens of file types inline. Here is what each viewer shows.
Documents
| File type | What you see |
|---|---|
| Paged document with zoom and page navigation; streamed for fast seeking. | |
| Markdown, MDX | Rendered text with an edit mode, math, callouts, embeds, and tags. |
| Quarto | Computational document rendered like Markdown, with code cells inline. |
| reStructuredText | Rendered to a clean document view. |
| LaTeX | Source rendered with math, sections, and figures. |
| Word documents | Rendered to styled, read-only HTML. |
| HTML | Page rendered in a safe, sandboxed frame. |
| Plain text and source code | Syntax-highlighted text with line numbers and find-in-file. |
| Config files (JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, and more) | Syntax-highlighted and pretty-printed where it helps. |
Tables and data
| File type | What you see |
|---|---|
| CSV, TSV | Sortable, scrollable table with inferred column types; handles very large files. |
| JSON Lines | Each line as a row, with nested objects expandable inline. |
| Parquet | Schema panel plus a scrollable preview; rows loaded on demand. |
| Arrow, Feather | Table view with the schema header. |
| Spreadsheets (Excel, ODS) | Each sheet as its own tab, with cell types preserved. |
| SQLite databases | Table list with row counts; click a table to browse its rows, read-only. |
Notebooks and ML logs
| File type | What you see |
|---|---|
| Jupyter notebooks | Rendered notebook with code, text, and stored outputs (images, tables, tracebacks). |
| Training logs | Metrics rendered as a table with optional plots over training steps. |
3D scenes and point clouds
| File type | What you see |
|---|---|
| 3D meshes (STL, OBJ, glTF, FBX, and more) | Interactive viewer with orbit, pan, zoom, and material toggles. |
| USD scenes | Rendered through the same 3D viewer. |
| Point clouds | Orbit-able viewer with point-size controls. |
ML model files
| File type | What you see |
|---|---|
| safetensors | Tensor index: name, dtype, shape, and size for every tensor. |
| GGUF | LLM weight metadata: architecture, quantization, and header fields. |
| ONNX | Model graph as nodes and edges with input and output shapes. |
| PyTorch checkpoints | State-dict keys, shapes, and dtypes. Read safely—no code is executed. |
| HDF5 | A browsable hierarchy of groups, datasets, shapes, and attributes. |
Diagrams, maps, and media
| File type | What you see |
|---|---|
| Mermaid, Graphviz, Excalidraw | Source rendered to a live diagram or saved whiteboard. |
| GeoJSON, KML | Features rendered on an interactive map with a property panel. |
| Images (PNG, JPG, SVG, and more) | Rendered at native size; vectors stay sharp. |
| Video and audio | Player with scrubbing; streamed for fast seeking. |
Archives and anything else
Zip and tar archives show a contents listing so you can inspect what is inside before extracting. Unknown file types fall back to a clean download link instead of dumping raw bytes into the view. Plain-text files with no special extension still open in the syntax-highlighted text viewer.
Comment on PDFs
Open a PDF in a tile and you can discuss it in place. Select a passage of text on the page and add a comment — on desktop a small chip appears beside the selection, and on mobile you tap the selection to get the same affordance. The passage gets a highlight, and the comment appears as a card in the margin rail next to the page.
PDF comments work like comments on any other file:
- Reply and resolve threads, and
@mentionpeople in the session to pull them into the discussion. - Edit or delete your own comments. Writers in the session can also remove a comment when tidying up.
- Comments persist. Close the PDF and reopen it later and your highlights and threads come back. If the file changed in between, each comment re-anchors to its matching passage.
- Large PDFs included. The document streams in as usual, and comments load along with the pages.
Because a PDF is read-only media, a PDF tile offers the commenting and viewing modes only — there is no edit or suggest mode for the file itself.
Agents and scripts can comment on a PDF from the CLI by quoting the passage to anchor to:
taiku func comment --file report.pdf --match "net revenue" --body "Is this net of returns?"Anchoring on a PDF is always by matched text — line numbers don't apply, and edit suggestions are refused.
Large artifacts
Big files stream into their viewer instead of loading all at once, so a multi-gigabyte PDF, video, or Parquet file opens quickly and seeks smoothly. Tables with millions of rows scroll without freezing because rows render only as you reach them, and Parquet row groups load on demand. You get a responsive preview without waiting for the whole file to download.
Search inside a preview
Press Cmd+F (macOS) or Ctrl+F (Windows / Linux) inside a viewer to open the
find overlay. Type to highlight matches and step through them with Enter /
Shift+Enter. Press the same shortcut again, or Esc, to close.
Search works anywhere the content is text—the text, Markdown, notebook, table, log, and document viewers.